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Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The Last Days On Mars: I Liked It: Made me miss Val Kilmer flipping Mars off in Red Planet

The Last Days On Mars is about the last days on Mars for a
team of astronauts planning on returning home. One of them makes a discovery
and it becomes a race to escape the planet before the evil alien bacteria kills
them all. (Yawn)

I’ll be honest, I fell asleep for a few minutes during this
one.

You can tell that this one has a
budget behind it – though not much of it was spent on the dust storm at the
beginning – the effects and even the acting are all pretty good throughout the
movie with a few exceptions, and unfortunately the exceptions are pretty big
ones.

I’m just gonna say it: Liev Schreiber is not a good actor.

The only
time I’ve felt he was a good actor was in Phantoms, at the end, when he was an
evil thing pretending to be human, or a human possessed (not sure about that
movie), either way he did a bang up job in that department. Every other movie
I’ve seen him in he just doesn’t seem into his work, he seems bored and talks
like he’s exhausted.

The movie
has one moment of originality, I thought, when the survivors are stuck outside
the NASA building on Mars and the bad guys are inside. I think had the movie
stuck with this plot, the good guys trying to get inside before their time was
up would have been pretty cool. It’s always the good guys just trying to keep
the bad guys out until the time is up, so the reverse would have been pretty entertaining.
Of course that’s not what happens.

Also, like
Contracted, the illness in this movie is wasted on something that is very
popular now-a-days when they could have gone for something much more original.

The whole movie is a series of missed opportunities to be
original.

I know
that I need to keep from getting my hopes up, and I do truly enjoy Netflix, but
seriously, after seeing this movie I told my wife that I feel like there’s just
nothing good on Netflix. Every new movie they get that is remotely popular, or
of a big budget, or just looks good, turns out to be a disappointment. My wife
and I spend most of our time on Netflix watching TV shows that we don’t get to
watch because we don’t have cable. We were up until almost 4 just the other day
finishing the most recent season of Mad Men to arrive on Netflix, and that
whole season was probably better than any of the most recent movies we’ve seen.
The same goes for Bates Motel, which not as good as most, is still pretty
interesting and we usually end up watching a few episodes of Bates Motel
instead of a whole movie.

Like I
said, we enjoy Netflix, and I wouldn’t bad mouth it because I have no intention
of getting rid of it – I’m mostly harping on Hollywood, and not even Hollywood
but the independent part of Hollywood.

The
independent movies seem to have lost the nerve to go original, and that’s a sad
and scary thing.